Customize the 2007 Office system to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application

On the off chance that you are considering deploying the 2007 Microsoft Office system to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application, you’ll want to check out a brand new article that will (hopefully) be published the end of next week: Customize the 2007 Office system to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application. This article was inspired by some support cases that the Microsoft Support team had. Apparently, this topic was not well documented – I mean, really, who wouldn’t want Outlook to be their default e-mail client?! I just don’t understand. J But anyway…

The short story version of the article is that for the following scenarios you will need to make some Setup customizations using the Office Customization Tool (OCT). This is to enable e-mail functionality within the 2007 Office system and for applications that are not part of the Office suite, such as Internet Explorer. The applicable scenarios are:

· You are deploying the 2007 Office system, without Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 or earlier, to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application.

· You are deploying the 2007 Office system with Office Outlook 2007 and you want the non-Microsoft e-mail application to be the default e-mail client.

· You are going to add Office Outlook 2007 to an existing 2007 Office system installation but want your existing non-Microsoft e-mail application to remain as the default e-mail client.

· Office Outlook 2007 is installed but you need a non-Microsoft e-mail application to be the default e-mail client.

The customizations instructions are different for each scenario. Each is fairly simple but it might be confusing in identifying which set of instructions to use. The process may involve adding some specific registry keys or adding Setup properties via the OCT. But it’s easy - really!

Please let me know what you think once the article is published!

And by the way, no special Office Setup customizations are needed to enable e-mail functionality with Office if:

· You are deploying the 2007 Office system without Office Outlook 2007 to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application and the client computers already have some version of Outlook installed.

· A non-Microsoft e-mail application is already installed and you then install Office Outlook 2007. Office Outlook 2007 will automatically be set as the default e-mail client after installation.

I’ll tweet (@MSOfficeResKit) once the article is live -though I’d prefer to “twitter”. Twittering sounds like something I’d like to do after eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

Update April 6th: The full article is finally available on TechNet - Customize the 2007 Office system to work with a non-Microsoft e-mail application.

- Cat